Substream-based soft handoff in CDMA cellular networks

We present a new soft handoff scheme that enhances the reliability during soft handoff by increasing the signal distance (Euclidean and/or Hamming) in forward link code division multiple access cellular networks. Each base station participating in soft handoff sends a disjoint subset of the main data stream (called sub-stream) and the mobile receiver reassembles the sub-streams and restores the main data stream. This approach can reduce the data rate per base station by a factor of the number of participating base stations and thereby can increase the signal distance as opposed to the diversity gain. It is shown that the proposed soft handoff scheme is promising for high data rate applications which are the major interests in the next generation cellular networks.